In a couple weeks, I’ll be invading Houston, TX to deliver a pair of sessions at Microsoft TechEd. This conference – one of the largest annual Microsoft events – focuses on technology available today for developers and IT professionals. I made a pair of proposals to this conference back in January (hoping to increase my odds), and inexplicably, they chose both. So, I accidentally doubled my work.

The first session, titled Architecting Resilient (Cloud) Applications looks at the principles, patterns, and technology you can use to build highly available cloud applications. For fun, I retooled the highly available web application that I built for my pair of Pluralsight courses, Architecting Highly Available Systems on AWS and Optimizing and Managing Distributed Systems on AWS. This application now takes advantage of Azure Web Sites, Virtual Machines, Traffic Manager, Cache, Service Bus, SQL Database, Storage, and CDN. While I’ll be demonstrating a variety of Microsoft Azure services (because it’s a Microsoft conference), all of the principles/patterns apply to virtually any quality cloud platform.

My second session is called Practical DevOps for Data Center Efficiency. In reality, this is a talk about “DevOps for Windows people.” I’ll cover what DevOps is, what the full set of technologies are that support a DevOps culture, and then show off a set of Windows-friendly demos of Vagrant, Puppet, and Visual Studio Online. The best DevOps tools have been late-arriving to Windows, but now some of the best capabilities are available across OS platforms and I’m excited to share this with the TechEd crowd.

If you’re attending TechEd, don’t hesitate to stop by and say hi. If you think either of these talks are interesting for other conferences, let me know that too!